July 22, 2015  Animal populations on islands tend to develop weird traits over time, becoming big or small or losing the ability to fly. One less-studied pattern of evolution on islands is ... read more

July 20, 2015  Anyone who's ever noticed a water puddle drying in the sun has seen an environment that may have driven the type of chemical reactions that scientists believe were critical ... read more

July 13, 2015  If not for a single genetic mutation, each kernel on a juicy corn cob would be trapped inside a inedible casing as tough as a walnut shell. The mutation switches one amino ... read more

June 30, 2015  While studying Yersinia pestis, the bacteria responsible for epidemics of plague such as the Black Death, scientists found a single small genetic change that fundamentally ... read more

June 26, 2015  Think of an object made of iron: An I-beam, a car frame, a nail. Now imagine that half of the iron in that object owes its existence to bacteria living two and a half billion ... read more

June 24, 2015  A tiny tooth plate of the 410 million year old fossil fish Romundina stellina indicates that teeth evolved earlier in the tree of life than recently thought. Jaws and teeth have been important ... read more

June 22, 2015  In 1964, renowned biologists Peter Raven and Paul Erhlich published a landmark study that introduced the concept of co-evolution. Now, an international team of researchers has used genomics to ... read more

June 18, 2015  DNA from the 8,500-year-old skeleton of an adult man found in 1996, in Washington, is more closely related to Native American populations than to any other population in the world, according to an ... read more

June 18, 2015  Scientists have provided the first direct experimental evidence for how primordial proteins developed the ability to accelerate the central chemical reaction necessary to synthesize proteins and thus ... read more

June 17, 2015  Medical and other researchers and science teachers around the world will be able to compare ancient DNA from humans from thousands of years ago with the genetics of modern day humans, thanks to a new ... read more

June 11, 2015  Funnel-web spider venom contains powerful neurotoxins that instantly paralyze prey (usually insects). Millions of years ago, however, this potent poison was just a hormone that helped ancestors of ... read more

June 10, 2015  Modern Eurasian peoples are genetically speaking not more than a couple of thousand years old. It was during the Bronze Age that the last major chapters were written in the story of the genetic past ... read more

June 9, 2015  A long-standing fact widely accepted among the scientific community has been recently refuted, which now has major implications on our understanding of how Earth has evolved. Until recently, most ... read more

June 8, 2015  A study by biologists now provides evidence that, at the molecular level, evolution is both unpredictable and irreversible. The study focuses exclusively on the type of evolution known as purifying ... read more

June 4, 2015  A fossil's age raises the possibility that the first animals to emerge from the water to live on land were large tetrapods in Gondwana in the southern hemisphere, rather than smaller species in ... read more

June 3, 2015  The first single-celled organisms with a nucleus originated more than a billion years later than biogeochemical evidence had previously indicated. In contrast to prokaryotes such as bacteria, ... read more

June 1, 2015  New research shows that the close linkage between the physical properties of amino acids, the genetic code, and protein folding was likely the key factor in the evolution from building blocks to ... read more

May 28, 2015  For the first time, a study shows that epigenetic marks on DNA can be detected in a large number of ancient human remains, which may lead to further understanding about the effects of famine and ... read more

May 22, 2015  Genetic material from fungi collections helped a team of researchers resolve the mushroom 'tree of life,' a map of the relationships between key mushroom species and their evolutionary ... read more

May 22, 2015  A new study of some primitive birds from the Cretaceous shows how several separate lineages evolved adaptations for diving. Living at the same time as the dinosaurs, Hesperornithiform bird fossils ... read more

May 21, 2015  Despite a billion years of evolution separating humans from the baker's yeast in their refrigerators, hundreds of genes from an ancestor that the two species have in common live on nearly ... read more

May 21, 2015  Dogs' special relationship to humans may go back 27,000 to 40,000 years, according to genomic analysis of an ancient Taimyr wolf bone. Earlier genome-based estimates have suggested that the ... read more